The Louisiana Purchase and the Push West

The Treaty of Paris of 1783 had already granted the United States a vast interior region beyond the Appalachians, and the Northwest Ordinance, passed by the Confederation Congress on July 13, 1787, established the model by which this territory would be organized: a gradual path from appointed governance to an elected territorial legislature and finally to full statehood "on an equal footing" with the original states, deliberately avoiding a permanent colonial hierarchy. Article VI of the ordinance banned slavery throughout the Northwest Territory — the first federal restriction of slavery in American history — while Indigenous nations such as the Miami and Shawnee, whose lands the ordinance formally promised to respect, continued to resist American settlement militarily for decades, notably in the Northwest Indian War (1785-1795).